


berry blues

by swordsainted



Category: Promare (2019)
Genre: Angst and Hurt/Comfort, I'm Bad At Tagging, Multi, One Shot, Other, and go crazy go stupid go feral, and then just absolutely say gtfo emotions, i was half asleep and thought 'blueberry muffins', i'm into those little moments you know??, idk i think sometimes you should be allowed to be sad, it was meant to be cute but then, polycule if you squint??, so that's the mood, take it how you want tbh i just love the boys
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-20
Updated: 2020-10-20
Packaged: 2021-03-08 18:00:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,425
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27120799
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/swordsainted/pseuds/swordsainted
Summary: “What thefuckare we doing?” he growls, and some more egg plops right off his spatula and lands on the ground between them.“We’re making blueberry muffins,” Meis says. He still hasn’t even looked up from patting the just-washed berries dry.“Yeah, butwhy the fuckare we makingblueberry muffinsin the middle of thefuckingnight on aTuesday?!”
Relationships: Lio Fotia & Gueira & Meis
Comments: 4
Kudos: 24





	berry blues

Gueira’s arm jerks, something stilted and pissed compressed into the motion like he’s trying to take out all of his frustration on the mixing bowl tucked between his forearm and his body. A little bit of raw egg slops out and splatters onto his bare foot, and he jumps back at the feeling with an indignant yell. 

Egg on foot is, apparently, his breaking point, because he whips his batter-covered spatula out of his bowl and stabs it in Meis’ direction with the kind of emphasis that is normally only seen when someone declares war. 

(To be fair, Gueira declaring war on not-even-mixed batter would surprise no one, honestly.)

“What the _ fuck  _ are we doing?” he growls, and some more egg plops right off his spatula and lands on the ground between them.

“We’re making blueberry muffins,” Meis says. He still hasn’t even looked up from patting the just-washed berries dry.

“Yeah, but  _ why the fuck  _ are we making _ blueberry muffins _ in the middle of the _ fucking _ night on a  _ Tuesday?!” _

“’Cause they’re good.” Meis says it in a very _ uh, duh  _ voice, and promptly flicks a blueberry in Gueira’s direction. It bounces off his forehead and is promptly lost in the steadily-growing mess on the floor.

Gueira is quickly nearing the verge of just dropping his mixing bowl on the counter and throwing himself facefirst onto the couch in utter disgust, but Meis catches his eye, and then Meis’ gaze flicks meaningfully over to where Lio is sitting curled up on the window ledge of their shitty little apartment, watching the rain pour down outside, everything but the drops trailing over the glass a vague blur. 

“And ’cause Boss likes them.” Meis’ tone is a little too neutral, shot through with a current of _ just shut up and help me, _ and Gueira chokes down his irritation and starts stirring again. It might be a little more aggressive than is strictly necessary, but still, it works well enough. 

“Fuck muffins,” he mutters, mutinous, like he’s going to start some anti-muffin crusade. Meis just snickers and flicks another blueberry at him.

“You like muffins.” 

“Well, yeah! Everybody does!” Gueira is feeling aggrieved; baking is not his wheelhouse, and normally that’s fine, but right now it doesn’t matter if he’s any good at this or not. Which he isn’t. He wouldn’t be surprised if they managed to fuck this up beyond repair, but more than most people he knows that sometimes you just have to do _ something  _ when nothing is working.

And lately, nothing has.

Meis finishes drying off the berries and rescues the batter from Gueira’s incompetent hands, an elbow to the ribs directing him to grab the muffin pan without a word. He leans up and drags it down out of the cabinet over the stove, haphazardly dropping cupcake liners into the spaces. 

His eyes are on Lio, still staring out at nothing; Lio’s features, reflected in the dark glass, are blurred and indistinct. 

He could be crying, and they wouldn’t know, but Gueira doubts he is. It wouldn’t be like him. 

If they hadn’t dragged him off and insisted on living together, where would he be right now?  _ How _ would he be right now?

The firefighting clown would’ve taken him in if they hadn’t beat him to the punch, Gueira’s sure of that; the guy looks at Lio like he hung the stars in the sky. (Or just set the planet on fire. Either or.) He has  _ some _ kind of feeling for him, whether or not he’s been able to put a name to it yet, and Gueira doesn’t think he’d ever knowingly hurt Lio, but there’s just one thing.

Galo Thymos isn’t one of them. 

And Lio has built his life around being Burnish, all layers of beautiful armor, carefully constructed. Ideology, goals, even outward appearances to a degree. Responsibilities.  _ Commitments. _

Gueira is pretty sure that, even with the best of intentions, Galo would never come close to being able to perceive the weight pressing down on those shoulders.

Lio had been the one to make the conscious choice to send away the Promare, the one with the knowledge of what would happen, the one with everyone’s blind trust and dedication in that moment. He doesn't know if it's crueler or kinder that way; Lio is carrying the burden of losing what might as well have been his soul, and giving up everyone else’s, too.

He’d made a choice to save _ everyone  _ at the cost of  _ everything,  _ and it’s still eating him alive to have ripped out an integral part of the Burnish.

Lio had kept them alive at the cost of their strength, part of their identity, and what had been for so many of them their only protection against a cruel and frigid world. So many Burnish had escaped from dark places when they’d gained the added protection of their Promare. So many Burnish had been alienated for the first time with the emergence of their power, too, and they’d all huddled together and turned their backs to icy torrent of rejection, hatred, bigotry, and  _ fear,  _ always fear.

They’d all protected their flames together, stoked them higher and poured all the tears and suffering deep in their hearts into that bond.

Lio had taken the distinction of _ them and us _ and torn it apart, imperfect and bloody and agonized, and as much as he’s suffering from it, Gueira knows that he’s feeling everyone else’s pain, too. 

The sorrow for all the dead Burnish, who they’d tried so hard for and failed despite their best efforts, year after year.

The uneasy gratitude of everyone who’d survived, only to be thrust into a world that had no space for them and still held decades of prejudice, a Promepolis that half-tried to throw together decent housing for them but somehow managed to group it all together at the outskirts anyway.

The hatred of everyone that couldn’t forgive Lio for what he’d done.

The trust of those who could forgive him, but still looked to him for guidance like he had any more answers than the rest of them in a brand new world.

Even after as many answers had been provided as possible, truths brought to light and horrors realized, there were still too many social divides to cross all the way, cracks between the different groups of ex-Burnish as they’d grieved, and them and the rest of the world still, even if those gaps were slowly closing. Healing was a process that would take years, even with the help of public figures like Galo standing behind them. 

Meis’ warmth settles behind him, close and familiar, and he reaches around Gueira to finish dropping the cupcake liners into the pan. Gueira wonders vaguely when the hell he’d stopped his task and started staring at Lio. 

He guesses it doesn’t really matter.

If they hadn’t picked out their crappy apartment when he’d been sleeping off what he’d done, Lio would have let everyone else burn him up bit by bit and not protested it. He’d been the picture of a martyr back then, chained down while they all strained to keep breathing, and when he’d  _ screamed  _ _ — _

He still hasn’t learned. 

Lio doesn’t know how to stop and worry about himself, Gueira doesn’t know how to express concern in any way other than clumsy upset, and Meis is good at pretending he’s got things under control but he’s not as good an actor as he thinks. Gueira still spots the way his brow pinches, and he thinks Lio does too, but Lio looks  _ hollow _ these days.

It scares them both.

“Fuck this,” Gueira mutters, and grabs a handful of berries, using his other (slightly eggy) hand to grab Meis’ wrist and ignoring the stifled shriek of indignation Meis emits at the gross feeling. His steps carry them across the joke of a living room space across from the little kitchenette so fast he doesn’t have time to think, not that he really wants time to think anyway. He means it, too. Fuck this.

Fuck all of it. The stupid politics, all the bullshit. Fuck everybody’s expectations, and the way it’s been pouring rain for two days, and the sort-of silence hanging between the three of them that they’re afraid to break because they don’t know if they can handle actually talking about it.

_ Fuck _ letting Lio just sit there and look like he’s already a ghost. 

Gueira stops right up in Lio’s space, and with absolutely zero preamble he slaps his hand over his face, smushing blueberries right into his mouth and over his chin and who gives a shit, honestly? Lio and Meis are both staring at him, eyes wide, and he can feel the tips of his ears start to burn.

“Yo, Boss.” He jerks a thumb over his shoulder in the direction of the kitchen counter, still covered in flour, and batter, and squished blueberries. “You gonna help or what? I’ll probably burn the place down if you don’t supervise.”

Meis peers over his shoulder, eyeing Lio with an amount of judgment in his eye that wouldn’t be out of place on some reality TV competition, and his mouth twitches. 

“Boss, you look like shit.”

Lio pulls a face, but he has to actually chew and swallow the fruit in his mouth before he can say anything. His nose scrunches, and he shakes his head, the ends of his hair touching and sticking to the purpley mess over his mouth and chin. “That’s disgusting,” he says, and smacks Gueira’s wrist. The motion is somehow  _ powerfully _ reminiscent of a nun wielding a ruler, and not for the first time, Gueira wonders if he’s about to be struck down for his insolence. “There was uncooked egg in that. Are you _ trying _ to give me salmonella?”

Meis rescues him from his inevitable yell of  _ what the fuck’s a salmonella _ by stooping to loop his arm through Lio’s, dragging him upright as he straightens. “Boss, you gotta help,” he says. His eyes are smiling. “This dumbass has dropped shit all over the floor. We haven’t even preheated the oven. If you don’t supervise us, this place is gonna get so wrecked we can kiss the security deposit goodbye right now.”

“Fuck the security deposit,” Gueira says. It’s pretty much pure reflex at this point. He’s said it more or less daily since they’d moved in.

Lio snorts. It’s a lot more undignified than he usually is, but then again, Gueira figures that you can lose some dignity when you’re sitting around in pastel pajamas with a couple of idiots destroying the place.

“Okay, I’m coming.” Lio swipes at his face; the only thing that accomplishes is getting berry juice on his sleeve. Gueira notes with a tinge of satisfaction that Lio looks offended. “After I wash my face,” he adds, and then swipes stained fingers over Gueira’s cheek before he realizes what’s happening.

_ “Boss!”  _ he yelps, and Meis starts cackling, only to get cut off by Lio doing the exact same thing to him too.

They can’t fix things for him. No one can. 

But they can remind him that they’re there, and that _ they _ trust him even if it feels like no one else does.

Gueira is sentenced to cleaning up all the stuff he’s dropped onto the floor while Meis mixes the blueberries into the batter with a profoundly self-righteous air. In the few minutes it takes Lio to emerge from the bathroom and roll up his sleeves, things are actually in some semblance of order, and it feels like the dull, heavy silence is gone, at least for now. 

They’re doing something they couldn’t do before, just because they can now, and it’s  _ nice. _

Muffin batter is doled out into liners, and promptly corrected because Meis poured too much into each. Gueira says some dumb shit and gets a teasing elbow to the ribs for it, and Lio  _ almost  _ slips and falls in one of the patches of floor Gueira had mopped up but hadn’t done a great job drying. 

Still, finally, the muffins go into the oven at something like one in the morning, and they’re all lying on the couch, tangled up and draped over each other, just a little too warm.

“Hey, how long do those take to cook?” Meis asks.

“I don’t know.” Lio’s voice is still audible, though muffled. To be fair, he  _ is _ slowly being crushed to death by two larger people flopped on top of him.

“Shit,” says Gueira, and then he starts laughing, because fuck.

Why would any of them know how long it takes to bake fucking muffins? It’s so absurd that they’re even doing this that he can’t do anything  _ but  _ laugh.

And Lio starts snickering too, because _honestly?_

Yeah, this is exactly the kind of dumb shit they’d pull, isn’t it?

“It’s not funny!” Meis protests, but he’s grinning, already well on his way to joining in. 

All three of them laugh until it hurts to breathe, elbows pressed uncomfortably into each other’s thighs and arms and legs skewed at weird angles, and it’s not so bad.

They’re still them, even if they’re in a new apartment inside the city limits and they don’t always know what to say, and it’s not so bad to be burning blueberry muffins in the middle of the night.

They burn the muffins, of course. It could be worse. They’re still edible, technically, and they’ve all eaten far more horribly ruined food. 

“We can dump the extras on the idiot,” Gueira suggests, and Lio blinks, a faint smile pulling at the corner of his mouth at the thought. 

“Yeah, he’ll probably eat anything.”

Gueira decides, a little reluctantly, that if thinking about Galo makes him smile, that maybe they should make sure he sees more of Galo.

“We were already planning on dumping the extras on  _ you, _ idiot,” Meis says, and Gueira tosses a bit of burned muffin edge right into Meis’ smug mouth.

“Shut the fuck up!” 

“You guys — ” Lio starts, and for just a second he looks too serious, like he’s going to ask them if they’re sure they’re okay (they aren’t, and he isn’t, no one is so what’s the point), and Gueira can’t stand it, so he points at the muffin in Lio’s hand instead.

“You gonna eat that or what?” 

Lio blinks in slow consideration, and then looks from Gueira to the muffin  — and promptly licks the top of it. “Get fucked,” he says, and Gueira is left gaping in shock.

_ “Boss!” _

**Author's Note:**

> i haven't had a muffin in at least a year, you guys. what kind of life is this? 😔💔
> 
> anyway, i just wanted to see the boys catch their breath for a second. they really deserve a break, huh?


End file.
